Review – Dream Home

by

Justin

-

July 22, 2017

This is a review of Dream Home designed by Klemens Kalicki. It plays 2 – 4 players. Realistcally, I’d estimate the playtime at less than 30 minutes.

Mechanics
This game is dead simple, almost to a fault. In turn, players draft cards from the main board. Place the room cards on your home board (set collection style) and apply any effects of the resource card you chose (if any).

The mechanic is not novel, no. It’s borrowed from countless games before it and made slightly more engaging by the spatial aspect of your home board.

I’m not sure, though, I would suggest anything more for this game. Its charm is its simplicity. Just don’t expect this game to hold up long for veteran gamers.

One mechanical suggestion I would make is that in a 2 or 3 player game, the first player gets to discard cards from the “market” area. This seems better left to the last player, as the first player not only has the opportunity to take exactly what they want but also discard something the rest of the players may want. It seems like a double screw for the subsequent players.

Theme
Players are building a house and stuffing rooms into it. Thematically, there’s no reason anyone would be drafting rooms they’d be forced into putting in their home, but it’s fine, really.

The game purports to let players build their dream house, but it can honestly be kind of a bizarre mess of rooms at the end…

I picked up this game specifically for its pleasant theme, and it delivers on that. Mostly, I wanted to relive the days of playing The Sims for endless hours, just swapping shit around in my imaginary house.

Art
Full admission, I have a soft spot for this “Facebook game” style of art – Imperial Settlers uses this too. The colors are vibrant, the people have massive noggins, it’s just pleasant to be around.

The house shaped board is fun, the chunky house first player marker is cool, etc. You get a good sense of what the artwork in the full game is like from the box image.

Pacing
This game zips right along. There’s very little time or reason to process much on the board. In a 2 and 3 player game, you are discarding cards from the “market” area and this is perhaps the lengthiest part of the game, as you want to decide what you want, as well as figure out what would screw your opponents over. As mentioned above, I think that particular piece could change.

But otherwise, the game is quick with basically no down time. It lasts just as long as it should and I wouldn’t change anything about that.

Value
The components are certainly high quality, but the game is very simple. If it weren’t so new, I’d expect it to be cheaper so the value is maybe a bit low for the cost here. It’s a family game, through and through, so unless you plan on playing the ever-living piss out of this, you might struggle to find the value.

Accessibility
It’s very simple to learn and teach. There are not many ways to get something terribly wrong in this game. I can see basically anyone giving this a try and having no trouble.

If I had to teach someone about drafting, I would certainly grab this game, knowing that it plays so simply and quickly.

Longevity
The game is dull, however. I can’t see myself bringing it out much because of that. I’ll likely see if I can coax someone in to playing, simply because I have it, but I think it will likely get traded away fairly quickly.

Final Thoughts
It’s a fine game, but overly simplistic and unsatisfying. The group’s summation was “yep, that’s a game.”